It's a Wonderful Knife

Book 5: Comfort Food

by Christine Wenger

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Comfort food and murder are on the holiday menu in the latest mystery from the national bestselling author of Macaroni and Freeze . . .
 
All Trixie Matkowski wants for Christmas is a break—just not the broken leg she got after slipping on some ice. With Sandy Harbor alive in the hustle and bustle of the season, it’s the busiest time of the year at Trixie’s Silver Bullet Diner. There are millions of things to do, including cater the town’s annual Christmas pageant and community dinner with some delicious holiday comfort food.
 
But the festivities turn into a bit of a turkey after Liz Fellows, the director of the pageant, is found with Trixie’s butcher knife in her back. Now Trixie must help the police arrest the scary gentleman—or lady—guilty of the crime if she hopes to get herself off the naughty list.

Release date: February 2, 2016

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 304

Sample

Praise

Also by Christine Wenger

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Recipes and Holiday Memories from Trixie’s Family and Friends

Excerpt from DO OR DINER

Chapter 1

I just love Christmas.

At times, the holiday season might be stressful. It always seems like there’s never enough time to decorate, bake, shop, write out thoughtful messages on cards, entertain, and enjoy the numerous events. But even though it’s busy and crazy, it’s a wonderful time of year.

I am a big list maker, and intentionally I write, “Stop, sit down, relax, and smell the cocoa.” And I make my cocoa with real chocolate, milk instead of water, whipped cream, a sprinkle of cinnamon on top, and a candy cane for a stirrer. . . .

After a long day of cooking, I was looking forward to making cocoa in my special red Santa Claus mug that Grandma Bugnacki bought me decades before when we visited Santa’s North Pole Village. I was going to sit down with a big plate of my mom’s snowball cookies with a fresh dusting of powdered sugar and wash them down with the cocoa, and maybe heat up more, if needed. . . .

I looked around at all the boxes and bins that I’d just brought up from the basement or lugged down from the attic of my Big House. Now, where was my Santa mug?

But no matter how much I loved Christmas and all that went with it, I would not decorate until the dishes were in the dishwasher after Thanksgiving dinner and all my guests were either gone or in recliners, sleeping off the tryptophan from consuming mass quantities of turkey.

Right then, on Thanksgiving night, all my guests were indeed gone. The only one sleeping in a recliner was my pal Antoinette Chloe Brown (who recently shed her married name of Brownelli).

So I could begin to decorate my diner, the Silver Bullet, which was only a few hundred yards off the main road, Route 3, the road that split Sandy Harbor, New York, in half, sort of diagonally.

I decided to take my sweet golden retriever, Blondie, for a walk in the thirteen-degree temperature and three feet of snow on the ground. Mother Nature and Lake Ontario had gone easy on us so far, with only one blizzard, but this balmy weather wouldn’t last.

“Blondie, come!” I said, and she grudgingly lifted her head from her cozy spot under my thick oak kitchen table. “Let’s go for a walk!”

She didn’t hurry to get up. “Come on. You love the snow.”

Ty Brisco, a Houston transplant who worked as a deputy with the Sandy Harbor Sheriff’s Department, and I had rescued Blondie when she’d appeared half-frozen next to the Dumpster at the back of the Silver Bullet. Poor thing.

We shared her, but I had primary custody. It got lonely at the Big House, my huge white farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch.

I got winterized—puffy parka, hat, boots, and gloves—and picked up a couple of plastic bins and a couple of boxes. I called for Blondie one more time, and she appeared at my side. Juggling everything, I opened the door, let her go out in front of me, and then closed it. Carefully, I felt my way with my boots across my back porch and down the five steps that would lead me to ground level.

Or was it eight steps?

I dropped to the ground like a cut Christmas tree. My packages soared through the air and a box of lights landed on my head. I did a split that any gymnast would envy, but I bet they’d never heard anything crack as loudly as a couple of my bones.

My teeth hit the snowy and icy sidewalk, and I spit out a tooth. Oh, sure. I’d just paid off Dr. Covey after a root canal. Shoot!

Blondie was barking, and I couldn’t calm her down. I couldn’t even calm myself down.

“Blondie, go get Ty. Go get Antoinette Chloe!”

She just stood there, barking. Then more barking.

“Get Ty, Blondie. Go get him!”

She stopped barking for a while, then tilted her head as if to say, Trixie, I’m not Lassie, for heaven’s sake!

“Yeah, I know. Just keep barking. Maybe someone will hear you.”

I tried to get up, but I felt like a manatee swimming through quicksand. Everything hurt, but mostly it was my right leg and ankle.

As I lay there trying to catch my breath, I noticed my big Santa Claus mug that I had been thinking of. It had fallen out of the box and was broken.

It was then that I began to cry.

I don’t like to cry, although I am a pro at it. I cry at sappy movies. When the channels start putting on their holiday movies, I am one big blubbering mountain of tissues.

But I was crying for myself then, because I saw my Christmas season melting away before my watery eyes.

Who was going to decorate?

Who was going to finish my shopping?

Who was going to cater the three dozen holiday parties (and counting) that I’d booked? Or the rehearsal dinners each evening for the holiday pageant at the Sandy Harbor Community Church? Most everyone was coming right from school or work during the four weeks before Christmas Eve, and they needed sustenance, so Pastor Fritz had hired me to provide food and drink.

And on top of all that, I was supposed to cater the community’s annual Christmas buffet after the play in the church’s community room.

I wasn’t going to be able to drive to make deliveries. I wasn’t going to be able to stand to cut, chop, and cook if all my bones were broken that I thought were broken.

I was getting pretty cold there, sprawled out in the snow and ice. My parka was usually jacket length, but right then it was midriff length, and I couldn’t pull it down no matter how hard I tried.

“That’s it. Keep barking, Blondie.”

Silence.

“Blondie, can you spell SPCA?”

She ran off to jump like a gazelle in the snow.

Finally Antoinette Chloe appeared at the back door.

“Trixie? What are you doing down there?”

“Counting snowflakes.”

“Interesting.” She yawned. “Why was Blondie barking? She woke me up. Want any coffee? I think I’ll have a cup before I drive home.”

“Antoinette!”

She knew something was wrong because no one, and I mean no one, ever left off the Chloe in her name if they valued their life.

And no one called me Beatrix for the same reason!

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I need help. I fell. And I heard bones snap, crackle, and pop.”

“Oh! I thought you were putting lights up around the sidewalk or stairs.”

“By lying on the ground?”

“I thought you were being . . . creative.”

“Not that creative.” My leg and ankle were throbbing. “Antoinette Chloe, call an ambulance for me. I’m hurt pretty bad.” I sniffed.

“I will! I will! I have to get my cell phone. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t go anywhere?” I mumbled grumpily. “I thought I’d go Christmas caroling with the church choir, but I don’t have my sheet music with me.”

I waited, and waited, and finally ACB returned. “You’re in luck. The ambulance drivers are at the Silver Bullet on a dinner break. Ty is on his way, too.”

“Good. Thanks.”

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve had to have been half-dead to want to travel in an ambulance, but these weren’t normal circumstances, and I felt half-dead.

I took deep breaths of the cold air and listened to ACB ramble on. She did help pull down my jacket, and I felt a little warmer.

Finally I heard Blondie barking and Ty’s deep voice in the distance. Then I saw red lights flashing. I didn’t know which made me feel better, but it wasn’t ACB’s talking about the upcoming auditions for the Christmas pageant at the Sandy Harbor Community Church.

“Trixie, why on earth do they have auditions? Everyone who wants to be in the pageant gets to be in it, for heaven’s sake. I think that being pageant director has gone to Liz Fellows’s head.”

“It’s her first time heading up a pageant,” I said, panting out each word. Where was my ride to the hospital? “She’s finding her way.”

“Margie Grace’s pageants were certainly entertaining. People are still talking about the shepherds tending a flock of salmon along with their sheep.”

I shivered. “But people didn’t get it when the shepherds did the tango with the sheep. It was a little over-the-top, even for Sandy Harbor.”

“Margie is hopping mad. She wanted to be asked again.”

“Trixie? What happened?” Ty finally arrived with Blondie, and I relaxed a little. “The ambulance guys are here.”

“I—I . . . f-fell . . . down the s-stairs.” My teeth chattered, and I tried to get them to stop. “My right leg and ankle hurt.”

“Don’t move.”

“I c-can’t anyway.”

“Here come Ronnie and Ron. Linda Hermann is with them.”

“Good.”

After much ado, I was wheeled into the back of the ambulance and covered with heaps of blankets.

“We are going to drive you to Syracuse,” said Ronnie. “I checked, and they have the shortest wait time in their emergency room.”

“Okay, Ronnie. Let’s go. I have decorations to put up!”

•   •   •

After an hour ride to Syracuse, two hours in the ER, and another half hour getting used to being on crutches, I was heading home in Antoinette Chloe’s delivery van from her restaurant, Brown’s Four Corners. Her van couldn’t be missed. On the side, it sported a colorful salami with a fedora dancing with a chubby ham in jogging shoes and a tennis outfit. Nearby was an assortment of cheeses watching the dancing and clapping to music that only deli items could hear.

I climbed into the van, or rather, shoved my ample butt up and into the seat, with ACB helping me. I plopped into the seat and then tried to position my behemoth of a cast into a comfortable spot.

It didn’t help that I had a couple of broken ribs.

“It smells like garlic in here,” I said, taking a deep breath.

“Fingers just made a kielbasa run to Utica. Remember?”

“Oh. I forgot.”

ACB and I loved this one kind of kielbasa that we could find only at a certain grocery store in Utica. I had turned ACB on to it, but I’d been eating it for years. It was a Matkowski tradition at Christmas and Easter and was complete only with fresh horseradish that I made.

Fingers, who was missing a couple of them, was ACB’s cook at Brown’s Four Corners Restaurant in downtown Sandy Harbor. ACB was thinking of selling the place to Fingers and opening a year-round drive-in movie theater on land she owned adjacent to mine, but she hadn’t figured out the logistics of snow and blizzard conditions on the drive-in screen or on the drive-in goers, especially if they came in snowmobiles or Amish wagons.

That was my pal ACB. Her ideas were as wild as her couture.

I glanced down at her sandaled feet. I had given up nagging her about wearing flip-flops in the dead of winter. She had some kind of aversion to winter boots. She told me that she lined her flip-flops with faux fur to shut me up.

“Do you want to stop for anything in Syracuse?” she asked.

“I’d like to go home and get some sleep, to be honest. It’s been a long day.”

“While they were putting your cast on, I called Linda Blessler. She’s going to work for you until further notice.”

“Oh! That’s so nice of her, and it’s thoughtful of you to call her for me. Thanks, Antoinette Chloe. I’ll call her later and tell her that I might be recovering for a while. The doctor said that I did such a number on my ankle that I couldn’t have a soft boot. He had to put a cast on it.”

“Oh, and I know you have a lot of catering coming up. Of course I’ll help you.”

“What about your own restaurant?”

“Fingers will shout if he needs me, but he never does. I should just sell the place to him.”

“Does he want to buy it?”

“I think so, but we never discussed it seriously,” she said. “Maybe we should.”

“Yeah.” I yawned. “The doc gave me something for the pain. I think I’m falling asleep.”

“Go ahead, but first, tell me how to get to the highway.”

“Go straight. Down the hill. You should see signs.”

“I remember there used to be an Italian bread bakery around here, right?” she asked. “I love their bread.”

“Antoinette Chloe, it’s ten o’clock at night. It’s probably closed.” I pointed to the tiny store in an old shingle house by the highway entrance. “See? Closed.”

“Too bad. I’m in the mood for warm bread. We could have shared it on the ride home. I’m starving.”

As if on cue, my stomach growled.

Antoinette Chloe laughed. “I see a restaurant over there. Are you interested?”

My throbbing ankle yelled, Are you nuts? but my stomach screamed, Let’s go!

“It looks mostly like a bar. Do you think they have anything to go?” I asked, hopeful that I could stay in the van.

We both must have looked in the grimy window at the same time as ACB tried to park her big van in a space fit only for my cook Linda Blessler’s red Mini Cooper.

“It’s a cowboy bar,” ACB said.

The mechanical bull in the window with a cowboy type riding it and ladies in Daisy Dukes cheering for him was our first clue.

“You stay here, and I’ll see if they have sandwiches to go,” she said, reading my mind.

“Thanks, Antoinette Chloe.”

“Yee-haw!” was her response.

I was going to point out that her dancing-salami-and-ham van was only half-parked, but she was already opening the door to the Ride ’Em Cowboy Saloon.

That was our other clue that this was a cowboy bar.

She came back to the car and opened the door. “Oops . . . Trixie, do you have any money?”

I went to reach for my purse but came up with a handful of air. “Oh, no. I don’t.” It was the second time I’d reached for my purse that wasn’t there. The first was to hand the ER intake worker my insurance card. Luckily they already had my insurance information from my recent late-in-life tonsillectomy.

“Don’t worry, Trixie. I’ll get us some takeout.” She slammed the door.

Yikes. We were headed for jail as sure as the snow was falling outside.

The heat was on full blast in the big, empty van, but I still shivered. I closed my eyes for just a moment, and when I opened them, I saw my friend Antoinette Chloe Brown riding the mechanical bull in the window.

I could hear her yee-haws and laughter over the heat blasting and over the highway noise. A couple of street people who were camping next to the highway in boxes and crates came to investigate.

“Someone being stabbed?” I heard one ask the other.

“I think it’s that lady in the muumuu riding the bull. She’s certainly enjoying herself.”

My friend’s rhinestone flip-flops caught the glint of the overhead lights surrounding the bull.

I had to get her out of there, or we’d never get home.

I rolled down my window and gave the horn a little tap.

“Excuse me, sir.” One of the men pointed to himself, and I nodded. He came over to my side of the van. “I just came from the hospital. I have a cast, and it’s hard to walk. Would you mind going in there and telling my friend”—I pointed to ACB in the window—“to come to the van, please?”

“My apologies, but I’m banned from going in there.”

“What about your friend?”

He looked at the man standing not four inches from the window, looking at ACB. “He is also not welcome.”

“Would you pound on the window, then, and yell to her that Trixie wants her?”

“Who’s Trixie?”

“I am.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They pounded on the window, got ACB’s attention, and pointed to me sitting in the car. Reluctantly, she waved to me, and slid down from the bull as her muumuu slid up.

Yikes.

I could hear the crowd hoot and holler and Antoinette Chloe grinned and waved.

Whatever I had been given in the hospital for pain and nausea was beginning to wear off. My body ached, my head was throbbing, and my leg felt as if I were dragging an anvil. I was hungry enough to search the pockets of my jacket for stray, lint-covered Tic Tacs.

I found one. It was delicious.

Again, I was feeling sorry for myself. But at least I wasn’t living in a box by the highway in the middle of winter like my two new friends, who were now staring at a platinum blond woman with a red sequined blouse and shorty shorts now riding the bull.

I looked up at the hospital that I’d just left. It was sprawled on top of a hill overlooking Syracuse and glowing like a lighthouse in the crisp, dark night. I was much luckier than most of the people in that hospital, too.

I ached all over, but a lot of people in the hospital wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas. I vowed not to whine or complain no matter how I felt.

Making a mental note to contribute to the hospital as my Christmas gift, I beeped the horn to my two street guys. My friend came over.

“Yes, Trixie?”

“Um . . . I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Jud and this is Dan.”

“This is all the money I have right now.” Pulling out all the change from the ashtray, I handed Jud around sixty-two cents. “Jud, if you and Dan ever get to Sandy Harbor, stop at the Silver Bullet and get yourself a nice meal on me. Okay?”

“We sure will.” He smiled, and I wished I could get him some dental work.

“Merry Christmas, Jud.”

“Merry Christmas, Trixie.”

Finally ACB shuffled out of the bar carrying several white bags. She hesitated when she saw Jud and Dan.

Rolling down the window, I shouted, “They’re okay.”

She plodded to the car. Dan pulled off the navy fisherman’s cap from his head and clutched it to his breast.

“You are my kind of woman,” Dan said. “May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”

“Antoinette Chloe.”

“Antoinette Chloe,” Dan repeated. “It rolls off the tongue like a song . . . or rather a poem by Lord Byron.” He cleared his throat. “‘She walks in Beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes. . . .’”

“Climes?” ACB’s eyes grew wide. “Don’t you swear at me, mister.”

Jud held up his hands. “It means weather. Climates,” he said. “Dan and I were both professors of literature until the school we taught at was downsized. Now we are writing a book about living with the homeless.”

“That’s got to be sad,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder to the mess of boxes and crates. “It’ll be even sadder as Christmas gets closer.”

My heart sank. “I wish I had my pocketbook, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Antoinette Chloe was busy searching in her cleavage purse. That’s what I called the depository in her cleavage, which held just . . . everything. She pulled out a roll of money.

I looked at her in astonishment.

“I won it. Over two hundred bucks. Apparently no one thought a full-figured woman in a muumuu and flip-flops could ride Cowabunga—that’s what they call the electric bull.”

She handed the money to Dan. “I am counting on you to make sure that they get whatever they need for this clime—blankets, soup, coffee . . .”

“You have my word, my lovely Antoinette Chloe.” Dan kissed the back of her hand, and she giggled like a fifth grader.

Jud nodded like a bobblehead. “Darling ladies, the charitable goodness you promulgate is beyond reproach.”

“Who said that?” ACB asked. “Shakespeare?”

“Judson Volonade.”

“Is he famous?”

“Not yet. He’s me. I am Judson Volonade.”

We waved good-bye to the professors and headed north to Sandy Harbor.

I felt bad for dragging ACB out of the saloon. She was having fun, but I was cranky from pain.

“So, Antoinette Chloe, do you think that Jud and Dan are legitimate?” I asked, taking a bite of a chicken tender. It was still half-frozen, but I could eat around the frozen part.

She shrugged. “I’d like to think so.”

“I just hope they are really professors doing research and that we didn’t just give them a drinking binge that will last until Christmas,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, I’m being negative, and I just vowed to stop whining and not to feel sorry for myself.”

“Trixie, you’ll still have a great Christmas, and we’ll all help you fill your orders and deliver them.”

Tears stung my eyes. I knew they’d help, but I was convinced my Christmas season wasn’t going to be the same that year.

Though maybe, just maybe, it would be even better!

Chapter 2

Ty Brisco met us in the parking lot in front of the Big House.

I bought the whole “point” from my aunt Stella when she retired. The point included the Silver Bullet Diner, twelve housekeeping cottages, which now total eleven (but that’s another story), and the Big House, all on the sandy shore of Lake Ontario.

Ty was a real cowboy, and he used to be a Texas Ranger until he decided that he wanted to work in a smaller department. Ty had moved there about six months before I did because of fond memories of fishing there when he was a kid and his father rented one of the cottages.

He’d thought he could pace himself in sleepy Sandy Harbor, but he’d been busier than he ever expected with a variety of crimes—mostly petty stuff such as directing traffic during the plethora of parades that Sandy Harbor loved, and some serious stuff during tourist season.

Ty opened the door of ACB’s van and held out his hand to help me out.

“Ty, you would have loved the Ride ’Em Cowboy Saloon,” Antoinette Chloe said as she leaned over me. A plastic miniature turkey glued onto lime green netting on her fascinator in honor of the holiday fell onto my lap. “I rode an electric bull there named Cowabunga.”

I handed her the plastic turkey, and she dropped it into her cleavage purse.

“Um, I gave up riding bulls—electric or otherwise—a long time ago,” he said.

I made a move to get out of the van, but suddenly became queasy from the crazy way ACB drove and the half-frozen, greasy chicken tenders from the Ride ’Em Cowboy Saloon.

Ty had better duck at a moment’s notice!

“Let me help you, Trixie.”

“I’m not feeling all that great.”

“I know. Antoinette Chloe called me from the ER. So, your leg and ankle are a mess, huh?”

I shifted on my butt and pivoted in the front seat to get out of the van. Some French fries slid from somewhere and dropped onto the snow.

“Yeah. I’m a mess. And I have a couple of broken ribs.” I tried not to complain, but I throbbed in places that I hadn’t known I had. “And I’m missing a cap on my front tooth.”

I put my hand in his and noticed immediately how warm and strong his grip was. Nice.

Moving my casted leg to the running board of the van, I felt the snow seep through the sock that was keeping my toes semiwarm. When the wind gusted, the right side of my jeans, which the medical personnel had cut for the cast, and which were barely hanging on by a thread near my crotch, flapped in the breeze.

Not one of my best moments.

“I’ve got you.”

He had both arms around me and was about to lift me onto the ground. Was he kidding? Now, Ty was a hunk, more than six feet tall, and studly, but he wasn’t immune to hernias.

“Whoa, cowboy! I don’t want to visit you in the hospital. I can do it. Just let me get my bearings.”

Antoinette Chloe laughed. “Get out backward. That’s what I sometimes do. Or maybe we can get you a plastic milk crate as a step.”

I could just see myself balancing on that.

As my jeans billowed out, I slowly turned around, putting my good, booted foot on the ground first.

“Wait! I have a plastic bag to put over your sock,” ACB said, going around to the driver’s side, pulling out our takeout garbage from a plastic bag, and tossing the trash in the back of the van.

She hurried to my side, her flip-flops flopping.

With one foot on the ground and the other still on the running board, she scrunched up the plastic bag, lifted my foot, and pulled the bag on. Then she tied the handles around my cast.

“Perfect,” she said.

The scent of onions from ACB’s onion rings order wafted up from the bag.

“Thanks, Antoinette Chloe,” I replied. “Great idea.” And it was.

“Need help getting that leg down from the van?” Ty asked.

“I can do it.” I just didn’t want to fall.

Slowly I got my foot onto the ground. With Ty’s help, I turned around and hobbled a couple of steps away from the van. It was then I noticed that the plastic bag on my foot was as slippery as a greased banana.

As I floundered, Ty gripped my arm.

He was like that. As a friend, not only did he stop me from falling, but he steadied me.

ACB was on my other side. She wasn’t everyone’s cup of hot chocolate, but she was the whipped cream of my life.

Just ahead was the long sidewalk that led to the Big House. Someone, probably either Max or Clyde, had shoveled and sanded the sidewalk. Just after that, the front stairs loomed ahead.

Remembering my fall, I sighed. Suddenly my ribs hurt even more when I breathed and my ankle throbbed to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”

I just had to keep my mind occupied and not think of my fall.

Which reminded me . . . “You know, guys, I have crutches in the van somewhere. I should be getting used to them.”

“I’ll get ’em!” ACB said, dropping my arm.

“Uh . . . okay.” Off she went, and I debated whether Ty could handle all of me.

Ha!

I felt his arm go around my waist and my parka, then compress. The couple of times that he’d had his arm around me, I was always wearing a puffy coat.

What a waste.

“How’re you doing, Trixie?”

“Okay. But this sidewalk seems endless, and the plastic bag is really slippery. I don’t want to fall again.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

It was time for the stairs, and, holding onto the icy railing, I lifted my good foot. Then the plastic-bagged foot.

Ty was giving my butt a boost, adding extra incentive for me to take my time and relish the experience.

The stairs were easy, but when I opened the door, Blondie came running and dashed between us.

Ty chuckled. “Looks like Blondie needs to use the snow. I should have let her out, but while you were at the hospital I got a call and had to direct traffic in town.”

Two more steps brought me inside, and I slid my coat off, then the bag and my wet sock, and tried to put my jeans together.

I needed duct tape, but that was in my kitchen drawer.

Sinking into a recliner, I put an afgh